Cats in the Cradle
by fearlessgoddess2
Summary: Sam and Dean go to a town where doctors can't figure out why babies in the same area keep dying. Just a short story.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1:

Chapter 1:

Nancy Wiseman lay sleeping in her bed, and groaned when her alarm clock sounded. She pressed the _OFF_ button and got out of bed, glancing back at her husband before running her hands through her hair. Suddenly, she narrowed her eyes. The baby hadn't cried at all the previous night. Not once.

Worry gnawed at her stomach and she bolted into the baby's room and over to the crib. Shock caused her to freeze for a full second.

_Blue face._

_Not moving._

_Oh God, Jessie._

"Richie!" she screamed, taking the baby out of the crib. She positioned Jessie the way she'd been taught to do resuscitation for a baby in her class. "Richie! Oh God, oh please God no!"

"Nancy?" her husband asked, running into the room. "What's—." He stopped, staring at the baby, their child, as Nancy tried desperately to get her to breathe again.

"Richie, call 911!"

Richie ran out of the nursery and into their bedroom, grabbing the phone and dialing 911 as he raced back to his wife.

"Yes, my baby's not breathing, we just came into the nursery and she wasn't breathing…my wife's administering CPR—."

"Richie, it's not working!" Nancy sobbed. "Get an ambulance! Tell them we need an ambulance!"

As the two frantic parents continued to panic, their Calico cat sat in the corner of the room, its tail flicking back and forth as it stared.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Sam pulled over to the rest stop on the highway, parking the car.

"Thank God," Dean groaned. "I have to piss so bad." At that, he got out of the car and walked quickly toward the small store.

"Really? I never would have guessed with you talking about it for the past twenty minutes," Sam murmured under his breath. He shut the door to the car and locked the car before following Dean inside.

Once the two had used the bathroom and gotten some food for the road, they took off again.

"So what else could it be?" Dean asked. "Shtriga, an abiku, what else is a likely suspect?"

"Honestly I think we need to do some looking around before we can make any kind of guess," Sam replied.

"Yea, that's what I'm thinking, but it never hurts to try to be prepared," Dean said.

"True. An abiku is a likely candidate, but a Shtriga I'm not sure. The last one put the children into comas before they killed them and it didn't go after babies. This one could be different, but we won't be sure until—."

"Until we do some looking around. Yea, I know." Dean took off the plastic wrap covering his sandwich and took a big bite.

Three hours later, the boys arrived in Torrington, Connecticut. After finding a motel, they checked in and locked the door, taking a picture off the wall on the left, and began to put up what would become a collage of information. Newspaper articles, information about creatures or spirits or demons they thought might be responsible for whatever was happening, it all got taped up on the wall. By the end of the case, the wall would likely be covered.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"So we really aren't sure what could be going on. Have the police been investigating?" the coroner asked.

"The local police were investigating until it became an issue for the FBI," Sam replied. "Now, some diagnosis that might be mistaken for SIDS is shaken baby syndrome, infant botulism…. Was there anything that would indicate something like that?"

"Nothing. I've been doing this for a long time, and I would know if there was something in a textbook out there that would explain this," he replied. "SIDS is just a condition we don't know much about yet. Hopefully the police or the FBI will find something that will stop whatever this is."

Sam nodded. "That's what we're trying to do. Thanks for your time."

"No problem."

Sam turned around to look for Dean and saw him talking with a girl that Sam thought was way too pretty to be working in a morgue. Sam rolled his eyes. Of course she was just the right amount of pretty for Dean to be talking to her. He walked over. "I think I got everything we need," he said to Dean.

"I'm just finishing up here," Dean replied.

Sam walked toward the door as he heard Dean say, "So the bar's named _Izzies_? Cause, I have the night off."

Sam waited in the Impala for Dean, going over the notes he'd gotten from the coroner. It wasn't much. He hadn't found any odd markings on the babies or anything in the toxicology report. The next stop was the houses the babies had lived in. Sam winced. He hated having to speak with people when a loved one had died, especially when it was their child. It was something that really stayed with him.

Dean opened up the driver's side of the door and got in, shutting the door. "You find out anything from the coroner?" he asked.

"Just a background on SIDS. Which I could have, and actually did, find online. He didn't find anything odd about the baby. He just…stopped breathing. You get anything?"

"Just the name of a bar that Kelly's going to be at tonight," Dean replied with a smile. "She did hear about the deaths. Just didn't hear anything interesting."

"So our first house is the first death — the Nicolsons."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

"We, ah…I went into the baby's nursery and…she wasn't breathing," Nancy Wiseman whispered, her husband's hand on hers. "I tried to help her but…they said…she'd been dead for at least a few hours." She wiped at her tears.

"Did you notice anything odd?" Sam asked.

"Like what?" Nancy asked.

"Any behavior that differed, if she was acting differently, less playful, less active…."

"No. No she was fine. Then she just…." More tears slipped down her face and she wiped them away.

"Are the police getting anywhere with this?" her husband asked. "Because this has happened three more times, I read in the paper."

"That's why the FBI is involved now," Dean told him. "Is it possible…could we see the nursery?"

Nancy nodded, but her husband squeezed her shoulder comfortingly. "I'll show them. You can get some tea." Nancy sighed softly and wordlessly made her way to the kitchen. Richard Wiseman led Dean and Sam up the stairs and down the hallway to the nursery. On their way, a cat darted down the hallway and Dean nearly tripped over it.

"Whoa, o-kay," he said.

"Here's the nursery," Richard told him quietly, opening the door. Sam followed him in, but Dean stood for a couple seconds, staring at the cat. The Calico flicked its tail back and forth, staring at Dean. It hissed at him once before darting down the hallway. Dean raised his eyebrows before following Sam into the room.

"You can, ah…take all the time you need," Richard whispered before leaving the room abruptly, closing the door.

Dean stared after him before looking at his feet, then started making his way around the room. Sam took out the EMF meter, scanning the area, and had the same reaction as the other four houses: just enough residue to prove that something had been there.

"Same thing," Sam said, moving it around the cradle. "Gets worse the closer it gets to the cradle."

"So something gets in here, kills the baby without anyone hearing it, and gets out, without any trace."

Sam nodded. "Looks like. One thing I don't like is the fact that every one of these houses had a cat."

Dean narrowed his eyes and thought for a second. "Huh. You're right. So what does that mean, aside from the fact that you can make weird observations?"

"There's lore that talks about cats going into baby's cribs, sucking the breath out of them. Maybe there's something that's coming into the houses, doing something like that."

"Well that Calico was a little creepy. Kept staring at me. And not in a good way. Do we have any clue where it's going to hit next?"

"There's no direction of movement," Sam replied, turning off the EMF and tucking it into his pocket. "The only thing is that it goes after a baby nearby the last attack. I think that if the cat thing adds up, though, we should be able to predict it."

"I doubt the parents are going to let us stake out their kid's room, so what, break in?"

Sam nodded. "Looks like that's our only choice."

"We gotta use the kid as bait," Dean muttered.

Sam hesitated. "Yea, looks like that's our only choice too. But one of us will be right in the room waiting for it."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

Sam sat in the closet of the nursery, looking through the crack in the door at the cradle. He'd been sitting in the same position for three hours, with nothing. He had his cell on silent so it only lit up when it rang, and Dean had called him three times, once every hour, to check up. So far nothing had happened.

Just then, Sam narrowed his eyes as the family's cat trotted up to the cradle. It crouched down before jumping up and over the bars, landing gracefully on the small mattress. The baby, which was sleeping on it's back, barely stirred when the cat jumped on. But it started to struggle when the cat lay down on its stomach. Sam bolted out of the closet in time to see something black start to come out of the cat's mouth, going toward the baby's mouth.

_What the hell?_

The cat's black eyes whipped up to Sam's before it pounced. The baby began to cry just as the cat hit Sam in the chest. It began clawing at him, but after a few seconds, Sam managed to get it by the scruff of its neck. It howled once and hissed at Sam before it did something Sam had never seen before.

It expelled demon smoke out of its mouth.

A long, deep cat howl sounded as the smoke flew from the cat's mouth up toward the ceiling. Sam stared wide-eyed at the sight and watched it fly out the bedroom door. He then heard a scream from a woman and a shout from a man, then hesitation of shock before the woman cried out, "Julie!"

The two parents came into the room and flicked on the light. They froze as they saw Sam. "You get away from my baby girl!" the man yelled, rushing past his wife and taking a swing at Sam.

Sam easily blocked the punch, twisting the man's arm around so he faced the other direction. "Please, just listen—."

"Don't hurt him!" the woman cried. "Please! Michael!"

Sam quickly let go and the man ran to the crib, picking up the baby just as the cat coughed a few times, got up, and darted out of the room. "I'm not here to hurt anyone. Your baby was in danger," Sam told her, holding his hands up in a calm-down position. "I know you saw what happened."

"What's going on?" she whispered as Michael came over, standing in front of her protectively. "What…was that?"

"What was that smoke that just went down the hallway?" Michael snapped.

Sam hesitated, swallowed. "That wasn't just smoke. Look, you know about the epidemic of SIDS going around, right?"

The couple stared at him. "What about it?" her husband whispered.

"What you saw…it was going to kill Julie."

"What are you talking about? What _was _it?" Michael yelled.

"It was a demon," Sam said quietly.

The couple did some more staring. "You're saying that _thing_ was going to kill my baby?" she sobbed.

"I only broke in here to stop it," Sam told her. "Truthfully, I've never actually seen something like this before in animals, only in humans. But it looks like your cat was posessed."

The couple stared at him. "Are you insane?" Michael exclaimed.

"Michael—."

"Posessed? My _cat _was _posessed_?"

"Michael!" Marie said loudly. "You know what you saw. I saw it too."

"It's hard to take in, I know, but I only broke in here to make sure your baby was all right and to see what was going on. Now I know how to stop it."

"You mean this is going to happen again?" Marie asked, her eyes wide. "Will it come after Julie again?"

"No, I don't think so," Sam said. "But I can take precautions to make sure it doesn't." He hesitated. "I'm sorry I broke in, but I really didn't have a choice. You wouldn't have let me help you if I told you what was really going on. My name's Sam by the way," he said, coming forward with a hand out to shake. Michael eyed it slightly. "I know this is hard to take in, but I'm not here to hurt anyone."

Michael nodded before gently giving Julie to his wife, then shaking Sam's hand. "I'm Michael. This is Marie."

"It's nice to meet you," Sam said softly. "You think we could go down to the living room and talk?"

The couple looked at each other before Marie nodded and the three of them descended the stairs. They went into the living room and Michael turned on a lamp, sitting down on the couch next to his wife, who was gently rocking Julie.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4:

Sam sat in a chair across from the couch. "My brother Dean is outside waiting in the car. He probably saw the light go on. I'm just going to call him." Sam took his cell out of his pocket and dialed Dean's number.

"_Sammy? Lights just went on. What's going on_?"

"Parents got out of the bedroom just in time to see the demon smoke go down the hallway past them."

"_A demon? I thought this was something with the cat_?"

"It posessed the cat," Sam said, his voice slightly echoing disbelief.

"_It posessed the friggin' cat? Dammit, I knew that thing was creepy_."

"Yea, you had good instincts. Listen, we're in the living room right now. They want to know what happened."

"_You think that's all right to tell them_?"

"Well I can't exactly leave without an explanation after what she saw, Dean," Sam told him.

"_Yea, true. You want me in there_?"

Sam moved the phone away from his mouth. "Would it be okay if my brother came in here too?"

Marie and Michael looked at each other once before Michael nodded. "I guess so, yea."

"Yea, come on in, Dean. Front door's open."

"_Alrighty,_" Dean replied before hanging up.

"You picked the lock?" Marie asked, staring at Sam.

Sam shrugged. "With what we do, it's kind of necessary sometimes."

"You mean…you've done this before? Dealt with…."

"Demons. Yea," Sam said with a sigh. "Kind of our job."

"I can't believe this is happening to us," Marie whispered, tears coming to her eyes, leaning into her husband. He wrapped his arm around her tighter, kissing her on the head.

The front door opened just then and Dean walked in, closing it behind himself. "So what'd I miss?" he asked, walking over to the other chair across from the couch. "Hi. I'm Dean."

"Nice to…meet you," Michael said quietly. "Now you want to explain exactly it was that my wife and I saw?"

"I've never actually seen an animal posession before, but that's what it was," Sam told them. "A demon."

Michael did some more staring for a few seconds before he spoke. "A demon…came into my house…posessed my cat…and tried to kill my child?" Michael asked in disbelief.

"We've seen weirder, trust me," Dean told them.

"So all the deaths the newspapers are saying are from SIDS…" Michael began, letting his voice trail off.

"There's a reason the doctors are clueless," Sam said. "I'm pretty sure it was the same demon every time. We noticed all the houses had cats, but we weren't sure what the connection was until I saw the demon leave."

"But it's gone now. Chester's back to normal, right?" Marie asked. "He's not dangerous anymore?"

Sam nodded. "Yea, he's fine. And we can take precautions so this can't ever happen again."

"What precautions?" Marie asked.

"There's a symbol I can draw on the floor under the baby's crib. It's like a…barrier against demons."

"And that'll protect Julie?" Michael confirmed.

Sam nodded. "While she's in the crib, yes."

"What about the next house it attacks?" Marie asked urgently. "They won't be protected…against the _demon_…God I can't believe I'm saying this."

"That's one bump in the road I haven't figured out how to get past yet," Sam replied. "Dean? Any ideas?"

Dean thought for a second. "Only thing I can think of is trap it when it goes after the next kid," he told him. "But that means we have to use the kid as bait again, which I didn't like in the first place."

"Is that what you did tonight?" Marie said sharply, narrowing her eyes. "You used Julie as bait for this…_thing_."

Dean thought for a second. "Yea, but…yea okay, we did. But Sam was waiting in the closet and we didn't really have any other choice. What would you have said if we'd come knocking at your door telling you a demon was posessing your cat?"

Marie sighed softly. "I would have laughed in your face," she whispered.

"There wasn't any other way we could make sure your kid was safe other than break in and prevent anything that was going to happen."

"Do you know who the next target is?" Michael asked.

"We have a guess, yea," Sam said. "It'll be the closest house to yours that has a baby and a cat. At least that's been the pattern so far."

"The Pattersons live two doors down from here," Marie said, looking to Sam. "They fit the pattern."

"Do you know them?" Sam asked, leaning forward. "Would they listen to you if you told them something was going to happen?"

Marie hesitated. "I don't know."

"Wait. I got an idea, Sammy," Dean said suddenly. "Now that we know it's a demon, we know what we're dealing with. And we don't have to use the kid as bait. All we have to do is convince this next couple we aren't insane."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5:

"Marie, Michael! How are you?" Ellen Patterson said. "And who are these handsome young boys?"

"This is Sam and that's Dean. Ellen, we need to talk to you about something."

"All right, come on in," Ellen said with a smile, holding the door open. She walked into the living room, where her husband was sitting, working on his laptop. "Mark, we have company."

"Hey, nice to see you both," Mark said, leaning forward on the couch to put his laptop on the table. Each of them took a seat, including Sam and Dean.

"Mark, this is Sam and Dean. They're…I'm sorry, who are you?" Ellen asked.

"This is going to sound like a strange question Ellen, but where's your cat right now?"

Ellen narrowed her eyes in confusion. "Baxter? He's outside. I just let him out. Why?"

Marie looked to Michael, who took her hand. "We had something happen last night. To Julie."

"Is she all right?" Ellen gasped.

"She's fine," Marie said quickly. "But that's only because these two boys were there to help."

"I don't understand, who are they?" Ellen asked again.

Marie swallowed. "Ellen, something attacked Julie last night."

"Attacked her?" Mark asked. "What are you talking about?"

Marie turned to Michael. "We think it's going to come after Harvey next."

Ellen's face went slack. "What are you saying?" she whispered.

Michael sighed. "Do you know all those cases of SIDS that have been going around the neighborhood."

Mark and Ellen both nodded. "Yes, it's terrible. You think that's going to happen to Harvey?" Ellen exclaimed.

"Ellen, Mark…this is going to be hard to take in," Marie said quietly. "Michael and I didn't even believe it at first and we saw it with our own two eyes."

"What?" Mark snapped impatiently.

"It was a demon," Marie finally said.

Ellen and Mark both stared at her for a few seconds. "A what?" Ellen whispered.

"Something posessed our cat," Michael told her. "I know it sounds crazy, but we saw it in our house before it left. This thick black smoke. It went after Julie and if Sam here hadn't been there…."

"You're joking, right?" Mark asked, glaring at them. "This is…some kind of…sick joke."

"Mr. Patterson," Sam spoke up. "Would you ever want to endanger your baby?"

"Of course not!" he hissed.

"Dean and I live by a code of, 'Better safe than sorry.' Isn't that the attitude you want to live by with Harvey?"

"I don't even understand what you're trying to tell me," Mark exclaimed. "A demon is going to posess our cat and come after our child? Is that what you're saying?"

"All we need you to do is go about your day normally," Sam told them. "Dean will hide upstairs in the nursery closet and wait for your cat to come in. We just need you to switch Harvey with a toy doll when you go to bed to make sure he isn't in danger. Keep him in your room. We can exorcise the demon, then we'll leave. It'll be like we were never here."

"Except for the protective circle under the crib to trap the demon," Dean noted. "But we can wash that off after if you want."

"Marie?" Ellen whispered. "Why are you doing this?"

"We don't have a choice," Marie told her. "We don't want anything to happen to Harvey. These two boys can make sure he's okay. It's their job. They've done this before."

"What, exorcise demons?" Mark asked, incredulous.

"Yea," Dean said gravely. "Look, we're serious about this. Dead serious. Now unless you want to move across the country tonight to get away from this thing, it's going to come after Harvey next. Probably tonight, especially because it didn't get Julie. And if you don't let us stop it, it's going to go after someone else's kid next. And it's going to keep going after kids until we catch up with it. Now we can't force you to let us do this…but think about it. Wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to your kid?"

They saw Ellen swallow and look at the floor. Mark's jaw clenched for a second before he spoke. "Get out," he spat.

"Wait," Ellen said quickly.

"No! I want them out of my house!" Mark yelled, standing up.

"You're willing to take that risk?" Ellen asked, standing as well, tears in her eyes. "Because I'm not. Because I don't want to wake up tomorrow morning with Harvey _dead_, knowing I could have stopped it."

"Mr. Patterson, I know this is hard to believe, but you have to trust that we know what we're talking about," Sam said earnestly. "You have nothing to lose by just following our plan tonight."

Mark stared at his wife for a second and closed his eyes for a moment before nodding. "Fine." He turned to the boys. "You win. What do we need to do?"


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6:

Dean sat in the closet in the nursery, waiting for the cat to come in. He'd been waiting for a few hours now and his right leg was starting to cramp. Sam was waiting outside in the car, just in case they needed some backup, but Dean was prepared with an exorcism.

Sam had called Bobby to explain about the posession of the cat and Bobby said that he'd heard about things like that, but they were rare. He said that holy water still worked on them, so did the circles to trap them, and as far as demons were concerned, in a human or in a cat, an exorcism was an exorcism.

Suddenly, Dean caught a flicker of motion through the crack in the door as the cat jumped up into the cradle. It walked over to what it thought was the baby and hissed when it saw that it was simply a doll. It tried to leave the crib, but the circle that the boys had drawn under the blue carpet kept it from doing so.

Dean came out from the closet and flicked on the light. The cat seemed to glare at him and hissed. "Yea, yea, you're a big scary cat," he muttered, taking out his father's journal. He opened it to the page he'd marked. "Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus, omnis incursio adversarii," he began.

The cat started to panic and claw at the crib desperately, as if trying to claw its way through the barrier, but it wasn't working. It started howling at that point and Dean winced at the annoying noise, but continued reading.

"In anima adversatricis potestatis," he continued.

The cat started to twist violently, the same as a person who was being exorcised would.

"…debitum praebere famulatum. Per Dominum," he finally finished a few minutes later.

With a long howl, the demon smoke expelled from the cat's mouth up at the ceiling and disappeared. The cat collapsed and Dean grimaced, walking over. He stared at the cat for a few seconds before it twitched, got up, and dashed over the railing of the crib and down the hallway.

"Nice," Dean muttered with a relieved sigh. "No more demonic kitty." At that, he exited the room, walking down the hallway, and came to the parents' bedroom door. He knocked and opened it. "Hey, everything okay in here?" he asked softly.

Mark, Ellen, and Harvey all sat on the bed, Harvey in Ellen's arms, crying. "I don't know what you did, but Harvey was spooked by that…sound. Aside from that…yea, we're okay."

Dean came into the room, closing the door behind himself. "Baxter's just fine. A little traumatized, but he'll be fine. The demon's gone. Sam and I will come back tomorrow though to replace the protective circle with a Devil's Trap," he told them. "It's like a shield against demons. That'll give you peace of mind. No demon will ever get into Harvey's crib again."

Ellen tore her eyes from Harvey's and looked up at Dean. "Thank you," she whispered.

Dean nodded solemnly. "No problem," he replied. "I'll let myself out." At that, he left the room, going downstairs, and left through the front door, locking the doorknob and closing it behind himself.

Sam looked over to Dean as he got into the Impala, keys in hand. "We in the clear?" Sam asked.

"We're in the clear," Dean replied. "Exorcism worked, cat's fine, family's happy. Told them we'd come back tomorrow to put a Devil's Trap under the crib."

Sam nodded. "That works."

Without another word, Dean started the car and pulled out onto the road.


End file.
